Saturday, February 8, 2014

When hardship is self-inflicted

FEW New Zealanders begrudge
some of their taxes being spent on welfare for people who, through no fault of
their own, have fallen on hard times and need a hand to get back on the rails.

Most draw the line, however,
at helping people who assume a right to be maintained by their fellow citizens
in the lifestyle of their choice.

I’m not talking here about the
usual sad suspects, such as the women who leave school at 15 and have a
succession of children, often by multiple feckless fathers, and rely on the
state to pay for their upbringing.

No, I’m talking about people
like the Auckland couple interviewed recently by the New Zealand Herald on what the Labour Party’s $60-a-week baby bonus
would mean for them.

The female partner lectured
in art history until a couple of years ago, when she took time off to study for
a doctorate (since attained).

She and her partner were on
the unemployment benefit when they had a son 16 months ago, though she went
back to work for two days a week when the boy was five months old and now works
a three-day week.

The couple also received an
accommodation supplement and family tax credits for the baby and the male
partner’s 13-year-old son from a previous relationship, though we were not told
what their total taxpayer support came to.

The male partner, meanwhile,
was described as an actor and musician with an “unstable” income. He had a
low-paid sales job but gave it up for a six-week acting engagement. He’s now
studying full-time.

What’s striking about this
couple is that they appear to have choices. They are educated. Unlike some beneficiaries,
they have some control over their lives.

But they chose to have a baby, despite being on an unemployment benefit.

She chose to toss in a full-time job to study for a doctorate. Assuming
her qualification is in art history, it’s not exactly a field rich in career
opportunities – but then, who are we to question her life goals?

He had a full-time job but chose to drop it in favour of a
short-term acting gig. Perhaps he felt a sales job was not worthy of his
talents.

The article didn’t say
whether he gets a benefit while he studies (another choice), but it’s
reasonable to infer that he does. They could hardly exist on her income from
three days’ work.

If these people have
experienced hardship, as they claim, then it was self-inflicted.

They are not no-hopers,
powerless to determine their future. They
have options. But underlying their decisions is the implicit assumption that the
taxpayer will fund their chosen lifestyle.

This is a perverse outcome of
a welfare system that has expanded far beyond what its original architects
envisaged.

We can only be thankful that the
couple’s sense of entitlement isn’t more widely shared – because if everyone felt
free to do what they wanted, comfortable in the assurance that the state would
support them, society would have collapsed long ago.

* * *

I RECENTLY spent a week in
Taranaki, a province much under-rated as a visitor destination.

Taranaki boasts the wonderful Tawhiti Museum just out
of Hawera, which deserves to be far better known than it is. It has nice beaches too. Oakura is justifiably famous for its
surf and Opunake Beach, snug in its little cove beneath the cliffs, has a charm
all its own.

As for New Plymouth, it has become a
very attractive city, albeit in an agreeably understated way. What a shame,
then, that it’s burdened with a monstrous visual blight in the form of the
power station chimney that rises above the port.

I remember my late mother, a
Taranaki girl, being appalled when this abomination rose up beside the imposing
Paritutu Rock in the early 1970s.

The rock is 153 metres high;
the adjacent chimney 40 metres taller.It’s almost as if the hubristic, all-powerful Ministry of Works was
determined to demonstrate its supremacy over nature. No one would get away with it
today.

The power station has been
defunct for years and it’s a mystery that this eyesore has been allowed to
remain. A controlled demolition with explosives would be spectacular. It would attract
more tourists than Womad.

* * *

OAKURA Holiday Park, where we stayed for three nights, has found an admirably efficient way to dissuade campers from loitering
in the bathrooms and toilets.

It subjects them to what Sir
Bob Jones used to call swamp-dwellers’ music, relayed from a local rock station
and played at industrial volumes.This
has much the same repellent effect as the Barry Manilow-style songs that some European
city councils play to drive young troublemakers out of public spaces after dark.

What’s puzzling is why an
otherwise quiet, pleasant camping ground feels the need to bombard its predominantly
older patrons with rock music. Is it another sign of deference to the cult of
youth, or simply a case of the radio station offering a sweetener to have its
music piped in?

1 comment:

I find your comments on people on welfare by choice-however stupid, interesting not just because it's often true but also because the left will never admit this for a minute, not for a single instance. In Australia Julia Gillard once said it when she something to the effect that Labor was a party of workers not welfare-not likely to EVER hear anything even vaguely like that from labour here and yet I would suggest that most people's experience is of coming across such cases on a daily basis. It's this disconnect between |Labour and reality that interests me.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.